Apple have effectively handed textbook publishing over to everyone with a Mac and an iPad. Maybe one day there will be a cheaper tablet for education but there’s little doubt that a great many students now own, or can access an iPad and the stage is set for collaborative authoring projects such as the one I’ve started  below.

I’ve taken some of the best examples of student work from their GCSE homework Posterous blogs and begun to edit them into the first chapter of a revision book for the whole class. I added some references to our syllabus, subtitles and illustrations. Click on the image below to download the part-finished first chapter (requires iPad and iBooks 2.)

The Author is powerful, but extremely intuitive to use, and providing an iPad is plugged into to your computer, previews of the book are instantaneous.

I’m thrilled at the opportunities offered by this development and really interested to see what the reaction will be from the class when they discover that they are now textbook authors. I’d hope to see them taking the initiative to continue adding to the iBook over the rest of the course.

CLIMATE by Simon

A few years ago I was enthusiastic about getting learners to find interesting angles in Google Earth, adding a suitable caption using Big Huge Labs’ Motivator tool. Who can forget the classic “Cabbage of Jub”?

Accompanying this presentation was a video by Oasis:

and a Google Earth file incorporating Gavin’s unofficial OS maps overlay (not to be used in Google Earth!)

Thanks to the students whose work is featured in this presentation.

Here’s a short video explaining more:

It took a little while, but we finally persuaded some wonderful older people to visit a small group of Year 8 & 9  in our Student Support Centre. Over the course of two sessions, the students found themselves asking dozens of questions; in fact the original purpose of discussing photographs was quite subverted by the quality of the dialogue itself. In the end we only got to add one photo to the History Pin data base, but we’ll certainly run future sessions and try and expand the project further. History Pin is my discovery of the year!

Volcanoes,
With the magma chamber underneath,
The magma flows up through the layers of ash,
And lava,
But people died cuz,
Of the poisonous gases,
And the pyroclastic flows of pressured hot ash,
And tar,
I-I don’t know,
Why they live in danger zones,
They live by volcanoes cuz of tourists and farmland,
What about earthquakes?
How do people live there?
They build strong buildings, it’s cuz of tectonic plates.

(Chorus)

By Rachel and Lauren ( Year 8 )